DeathIs Death Our Only Destiny

Soon after we arrive on this earth, we become aware of the most fundamental fact of our existence-that we won't be here very long. An average lifespan lasts less than 30,000 days. We sleep a third of that time, so the days we experience number less than 20,000. We may try, but we can't ever completely deny our mortality. Reminders keep cropping up: classmates fail to return after a summer break; we drive to work on a beautiful spring day, and a line of cars with lights on and a hearse in front suddenly appears; each day's paper carries numerous obituaries.

Though the Psalmist tells us there is wisdom in numbering our days and realizing this world is not our home, the process of be coming aware is extraordinarily painful. The unbelievable brevity of our lives conflicts with our deep-seated yearning for permanence and with our lifelong fear of being separated from those we love a fear that haunts us from infancy to old age.

How do we resolve and come to terms with what Freud called "the painful riddle of death"? Socrates said, "The true philosopher is always pursuing death and dying." Most of the great writers, including Freud and Lewis, dealt extensively with this theme. A few comments from their writings are particularly important. How they reacted to the death of their friends and family and how each of them confronted his own death will help us understand how his respective worldview addressed this "painful riddle." Freud quotes Schopenhauer that "the problem of death stands at the outset of every philosophy." Indeed, the problem of-death influenced Freud and Lewis in choosing their specific philosophy of life.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud reveals that his awareness of death began as a young child. When he was about two years of age, his young brother Julius died. During his self-analysis, Freud claimed that he recalled his reaction to the death. Because of his jealousy of the infant, he felt guilty. "I greeted my one-year-younger brother (who died after a few months) with adverse wishes and genuine childhood jealousy; and ... his death left the germ of [self-] reproaches in me."

Freud also recalled a discussion with his mother in which she told him that "we are all made of earth and must therefore return to earth." The young boy expressed his doubts. She then supported her statement with "proof." "My mother thereupon rubbed the palms of her hands together-just as she did when making dumplings, except that there was no dough between them-and showed me the blackish scales of epidermis produced by the friction as proof that we were made of earth. My astonishment at this ocular demonstration knew no bounds and I acquiesced on the belief which I was later to hear expressed in the words: 'Du hist der Natur einen Tod schuldig."' (Thou owest Nature a death.)

In a letter written in 1914, Freud shared insights on war derived from his clinical work. "Psychoanalysis has concluded ... that primitive, savage, evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any individual, but continue their existence, although in a repressed state-in the unconscious ... " Because these impulses "wait for opportunities" to be expressed and because war offers such an opportunity, wars will continue to be a recurrent part of history. As the human race has become more educated and more knowledgeable, wars have become not less but more frequent and more

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destructive. The reason for this is "that our intellect is a feeble and dependent thing, a plaything and tool of our impulses and emotions."

Wars demonstrate that our basic impulses have changed little from those of our primitive ancestors, that underneath our civility we are just as uncivilized and savage as ever. Wars show that "our unconscious is just as inaccessible to the idea of our own death, just as murderously inclined towards strangers, just as divided (that is, ambivalent) towards those we love, as was primeval man."

In 1914, in a paper titled "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," Freud makes the interesting observation that death does not exist in our unconscious mind. Our minds appear to be so constructed that we expect permanence. Freud writes: "Our unconscious then does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal." We cannot "imagine our own death and when we at tempt to do so, we can perceive that we are in fact still spectators. Hence ... no one believes in his own death." Freud avoids giving any philosophical interpretation to this provocative observation. Perhaps Lewis would say that our minds refuse death because death was not part of the original "plan of creation."

Freud closes his essay on war and death with a curious suggestion: "If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death." Freud realized what many in psychiatry have long observed: To fully live, one must resolve the problem of death. When left unresolved, one spends excessive energy denying it or becoming obsessed with it. Freud left no doubt as to how he handled the problem. He became obsessed with death, extraordinarily fearful and superstitious about it. Freud dreamed about death continually. His physician described Freud's preoccupation with death as "superstitious and obsessive."

When thirty-eight years old, Freud wrote that in his opinion he would "go on suffering from various complaints for another four to five to eight years, with good and bad periods, and then between forty and fifty perish very abruptly from a rupture of the heart; if it is not close to forty, it is not so bad at all."

At fifty-three, Freud made his one and only visit to the United States. He met William James, the famous American philosopher and psychologist. James made a positive and "lasting impression" on Freud, especially the way James confronted his own death. "I shall never forget one little scene that occurred as we were on a walk together. He stopped suddenly, handed me a bag he was carrying and asked me to walk on, saying that he would catch me up as soon as he had got through an attack of angina pectoris which was just coming on. He died of that disease a year later; and I have always wished that I might be as fearless as he was in the face of approaching death."

When fifty-four years old, Freud wrote: 'We have grown old since we first shared the small pleasures of student life. Now life is running out." For Freud, birthdays were not a time of joy and celebration, but of despair. "If I had known how little joy I would have on my sixtieth birthday, my first would probably not have given me pleasure either. It would be in the best of times only a melancholic celebration."

Six years later Freud continued to feel he would soon die. To a friend he wrote: "Now you too have reached your sixtieth birthday, while I, six years older, am approaching the limit of life and may soon expect to see the end of the fifth act of this rather incomprehensible and not always amusing

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comedy." In short, Freud was certain that he would die at forty-one; then at fifty-one; then at sixty one and sixty-two; and when he was seventy he was certain he would die at eighty.

C. G. Jung illustrates the rather bizarre, superstitious process of his thinking: "Some years ago I discovered within me the conviction that I would die between the ages of 61 and 62 ... Then I went to Greece with my brother and it was really uncanny how often the number 61 or 62 kept cropping up in all sorts of numbered objects ... It depressed me, but I had hopes of breathing easy when we got to the hotel in Athens and were assigned rooms on the first floor. Here, I was sure, there could be no No. 61. I was right, but I was given 31 (which with fatalistic license could be regarded as half of 61 or 62) ... "Then Freud noticed the number 31 kept coming up even more frequently.

But when and how did he first arrive at "the conviction that [he] would die between the ages of 61 and 62"? It began to preoccupy him in 1899. "At that time two events occurred. First, I wrote The Interpretation of Dreams ... second, I received a new telephone number ... 14362 ... when I wrote The Interpretation of Dreams I was 43 years old." Like a numerologist, he concludes: "Thus, it was plausible to suppose that the other figures signified the end of my life, hence 61 or 62." Freud explains: "The superstitious notion that I would die between the ages of 61 and 62 proves to coincide with the conviction that with The Intrepretation of Dreams I had completed my work, that there was nothing more for me to do and that I might just as well lie down and die." Then, perhaps to reassure himself, he adds: ''You will admit that after this substitution it no longer sounds so absurd."

In 1917, eight years later, he continued to believe he would die at age sixty-one. "I have been working very hard, feel worn out and am beginning to find the world repellently loathsome. The superstition that my life is due to finish in February 1918 often seems to me quite a friendly idea ..."

Freud's "superstition" that he would die at a specific age continued even at the age of eighty and gave him no peace. At that time he was certain he would die very soon, having reached "the limit of life which my father and brother reached. I am still lacking one more year until then ... I keep brooding on whether I shall reach the age of my father and brother, or even that of my mother, tortured as I am by the conflict between the desire for rest, the dread of renewed suffering (which a prolonged life would mean) and by the anticipation of sorrow at being separated from everything to which I am still attached."

Freud speaks openly of his fear in his letters. "As for me, I note migraine, nasal secretion, and attacks of fears of dying," Freud writes his friend Fleiss when still in his thirties. Ernest Jones writes: "As far back as we know anything of Freud's life he seems to have been prepossessed with thoughts about death, more so than any other great man I can think of ... Even in his early years of our acquaintance, he had the disconcerting habit of parting with the words 'Goodbye; you may never see me again."' Jones continues: "There were the repeated attacks of what he called 'Todesangst' (dread of death). He hated growing old even as early as his forties, and as he did so the thoughts of death became increasingly clamorous. He once said he thought of it every day of his life, which is certainly unusual."

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In his later years he feared the pain of a terminal illness-but what was it that so tortured his younger years? And did these fears relate to his worldview?

Freud gives a hint of his fears in The Interpretation of Dreams. He describes this book as containing "the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make." Freud observes that children often dream that a rival sibling has died and that such dreams reflect an unconscious wish that the rival go away. To those who object that children would not be so depraved as to wish for the death of another child, Freud reminds them that children do not conceptualize or fear death as do adults. He then lists what he thinks adults fear about death: "the horrors of corruption ... freezing in the ice-cold grave ... the terrors of eternal nothingness." He then adds that adults cannot tolerate these fears, "as is proved by all the myths of a future life." Freud believed that people accepted the religious worldview because of their fear of death and their wish for permanence. Yet "the terrors of eternal nothingness" preoccupied Freud more than most people-and he remained an unbeliever, re signed to the harsh reality of his worldview.

Lewis's case is quite the opposite. Lewis describes his state of mind before his transition as extremely pessimistic and of having no desire that life continue in any form. "Nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless ... I was so far from wishful thinking that I hardly thought anything true unless it contradicted my wishes." But Lewis said there was one exception-he did acknowledge one wish.

Paradoxically, in contradiction to Freud's theory, Lewis asserts that his attraction to atheism "gratified my wishes." This wish consisted of a strong need to be free of any Authority interfering with his life, as well as a quick and easy way out when circumstances became intolerable. "The materialist's universe had the enormous attraction that . . . death ended all . . . And if ever finite disasters proved greater than one wished to bear, suicide would always be possible. The horror of the Christian universe was that it had no door marked Exit."

When Freud lost a loved one through death, he felt utterly hope less. In a letter to Jones he wrote, "I was about your age (41 years old) when my father died, and it revolutionized my soul. Can you re member a time so full of death as this?" In Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, his father's death comes up frequently. He writes in the preface to the second edition that "this book has a further subjective significance for me personally . . . It was, I found, a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father's death."

In 1896, upon the event, he writes to Fliess: "Yesterday we buried the old man, who died during the night of October 23. He bore him self bravely to the end, just like the altogether unusual man he had been ... he must have had meningeal hemorrhages ... and spasms from which he would then awake free of fever. The last attack was followed by pulmonary edema and quite an easy death ... I am re ally quite down because of it." A week later, Freud mourns: "The old man's death has affected me deeply. I valued him highly, understood him very well, and with his peculiar mixture of deep wisdom and fantastic light-heartedness he had a significant effect on my life. By the time he died, his life had long been over, but in [my] inner self the whole past has been reawakened by this event."

When sixty-four, Freud lost a young and beautiful daughter. Freud had had six children, three sons and three daughters, and he loved no one in the world more than his daughter Sophie.

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In 1912 she had married. Sophie and her husband had lived in Hamburg for eight years when she suddenly became ill with influenza. ''Yesterday morning our dear lovely Sophie died," Freud wrote his mother on January 26, 1920. He explained that his wife Martha was too upset to "undertake the journey and, in any case, she wouldn't have found Sophie alive ... She is the first of our children we have to outlive." And the next month, in a letter to the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, Freud mentions that neither he nor his wife "has got over the monstrous fact of children dying before their parents." Perhaps Freud never fully recovered from the loss. Almost a decade later he opens a letter to Binswanger with "My daughter who died would have been thirty-six years old today." In another letter: "Since I am profoundly irreligious there is no one I can accuse, and I know there is nowhere to which any complaint could be addressed. Deep down I can trace the feeling of a deep narcissistic hurt that is not to be healed."

Within three years Freud suffered another loss in the family Sophie's son, who had been about a year old at the time of his mother's death. The death of this child evoked the strongest reaction in Freud of any of his losses. 'We brought here from Hamburg Sophie's younger son, Heinele, now aged 4.5. He was indeed an enchanting little fellow, and I myself was aware of never having loved a human being, certainly never a child, so much," writes Freud in a letter to some friends. He mentions the child lacked the proper medical care in Hamburg and came to Vienna to live with the Freuds. "The child became ill again two weeks ago, temperature be tween 102 and 104, headaches and ... finally the slow but sure realization that he has a miliary tuberculosis, in fact that the child is lost. He is now lying in a coma with paresis ... the doctors say it can last a week, perhaps longer, and recovery is not desirable ... " Then Freud cries out in his sorrow: "I don't think I have ever experienced such grief; perhaps my own sickness contributes to the shock. I work out of sheer necessity; fundamentally everything has lost its meaning for me ... I find no joy in life." Freud writes to the boy's father that "I have spent some of the blackest days of my life in sorrowing about the child. At last ... I can think of him quietly and talk of him without tears." Freud admits once again he has no resources to draw on for comfort: "The only consolation for me is that at my age I would not have seen much of him." According to Jones, this is the only time recorded in Freud's life that he shed tears.

Seven years later Freud experienced still another death in the family. During the summer of 1930, Freud's mother passed away. She was ninety-five years old and Freud was seventy-four. Because of the mixed feelings Freud had toward his father and the special relationship with his mother during his childhood-recalled in his self-analysis and reflected in his Oedipus complex theory-one would expect that her loss would have been more disturbing than the loss of his father. Just the opposite appears to be the case. In a letter to Jones, Freud confessed: "I will not disguise the fact that my reaction to this event has ... been a curious one . . . on the surface I can detect only two things: an increase in personal freedom, since it was always a terrifying thought that she might come to hear of my death; and secondly, the satisfaction that at last she has achieved the deliverance for which she had earned a right after such a long life." Did Freud experience no grief or sorrow? He acknowledged that al though his younger brother experienced grief, he did not. "No pain, no grief, which is probably to be explained by ... the great age and the end of the pity we had felt at her helplessness. With that a feel ing of liberation, of release, which I think I can understand. I was not allowed to die as long as she was alive, and now I may." And then another startling admission: "I was not at the funeral." Freud was still very active, productive, and mobile. What

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could possibly have been the reason he missed the funeral? Was he so terrified of death he could not bring himself to attend?

Freud's intense reaction to his father's death, which so deeply disturbed him, and his experiencing "no grief or sorrow" over his mother, illustrates a frequently observed, paradoxical clinical response to death: the more negative and unresolved the feelings to ward the dead family member, especially the parent, the more difficulty one has resolving the loss.

Although Freud feared death and obsessed over dates he would die, he insisted he wanted to know from his physician when his time was up. "I hope that when my time comes," Freud wrote in a letter when he was forty-three years old, "I shall find someone who will treat me with greater respect and tell me when to be ready. My father was fully aware of it, did not talk about it, and retained his beautiful composure to the end."

When Freud did become seriously ill, and his physicians diagnosed cancer, his young internist, Dr. Felix Deutsch, along with the surgeon, withheld the diagnosis. Deutsch reported that Freud had asked him for help in leaving this world with decency if he were doomed to die in suffering. It was Deutsch's fear that Freud would commit suicide that made him reticent. When Freud later found out: he felt betrayed. Deutsch suggested he withdraw as Freud's physician, fearing that Freud had lost the .complete trust necessary in a doctor-patient relationship. Freud agreed, and although they terminated their professional relationship, they remained friends. (Later, Felix Deutsch became an analyst and with his wife Helene, also an analyst, moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was my analyst during my psychiatric training.)

When Freud moved to London to escape the Nazis, he managed to obtain visas for his whole family, his maid Paula Fichtl, and his forty-one-year-old physician, Dr. Max Schur, an internist. Schur treated Freud during the final stages of his illness. Because he was with Freud during his last months, and at the moment he died, I will lean heavily on his account of how Freud confronted and reacted to his death.

Freud and his family arrived in London on June 6, 1938, and during their trip Freud had developed what his physician referred to as "minor cardiac symptoms." He had also developed some new lesions in the roof of his mouth that his doctor feared were cancerous. A surgeon performed an operation in September of that year, and Freud healed slowly and painfully.

The Freuds moved to 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, northwest London, on September 27, 1938. Freud's death occurred in that home just one year later, on September 23, 1939.

During his last days, as Dr. Schur noted, Freud selected his books"very carefully." A few months before he died, he read The Emperor, the Sages, and Death by Rachel Berdach. ''Your mysterious and beautiful book ... has pleased me ... I haven't read anything so substantial and poetically accomplished for a long time," Freud wrote to the author. "Judging by the priority you grant to death, you must be very young ... won't you give me the pleasure of paying me a visit one day?"

Max Schur noticed how deeply the book moved Freud and read it several times himself. Berdach focuses on the reality of death, and the fear it evokes, raising many questions-e.g., is man alone cursed with the knowledge of death in the midst of life? Believers and unbelievers each share

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their understanding of death. One discussion, between a bishop and an Arab physician, focuses on the miraculous resurrection of Lazarus by Jesus of Nazareth and the difficulty of having to face death a second time. One of Freud's favorite poems by the writer Heine was titled "Lazarus." Did Freud's attraction to the story of Lazarus reflect his own desire for permanence? The hero of Berdach's book dies by awakening one night to an uncanny silence. Everyone in his town has gone, and only he has been left behind by the Angel of Death. He dies in a state of panic, despair, and abandonment.

On September 22, 1939, the day before Freud died by euthanasia, he selected from his library Balzac's book The Fatal Skin (La Peau de Chagrin.) Freud knew that within a few hours he would ask his doctor to end his life. Of the hundreds of books he read during his lifetime, why The Fatal Skin? The plot is not simple. The hero, Raphael, a "young scientific man" with a craving for riches and fame, considers himself highly gifted but unappreciated and a failure. He plans to commit suicide. "Vehement must the storms be which compel a soul to seek for peace from the trigger of a pistol," writes the author, among several comments on those who take their own lives. Raphael meets the devil, who promises to fulfill all of the young man's cravings for fame and fortune. "I will make you richer, more powerful and of more consequence than a constitutional king," promises the devil. But as part of the pact, Raphael must take "the skin of a wild ass." With each wish the hero makes, the skin will shrink a little and shorten his life. The devil warns Raphael° that "to Will consumes us: to have our Will destroys us . . . I will tell you the great secret of human life. By two instinctive processes man exhausts the springs of life within him. Two verbs cover all the forms which these two causes of death may take-to Will and to have your Will."

As the hero becomes wealthy and has more and more of his wishes granted, he finds others resent him. As he talks about himself, one can understand how Freud may have identified with him. The hero muses: "Thought is the key to all treasures ... I have soared above this world, where my enjoyments have been intellectual joy . . . I possess the power of readily expressing my thoughts, and I could take a forward place in the great field of knowledge; and is not this the result of scientific curiosity, of excessive application, and a love of reading which possessed me from the age of seven till my entry into life? ... My exuberant self-esteem came to my aid; I had that intense belief in my destiny, which perhaps amounts to genius ...”

Raphael says others have "accused him of haughtiness," that he has made others aware of their "mediocrity," and they "took revenge by submitting him to a kind of ostracism." Certainly, Freud could identify with these thoughts-especially with the ostracism and rejection he experienced from the scientific and medical community. The novel contains passages about a famous painting of Jesus Christ as well as discussions concerning the existence and nature of God. "I will not believe," Raphael says, "that the Supreme Being would take pleasure in torturing a harmless creature."

More and more of Raphael's wishes are granted. The skin continues to shrink and the hero knows his life is coming to an end. tries to find a means of stretching the skin but fails. "It is all over with me," he cries. "It is the finger of God! I shall die!" The novel closes with the hero dying in a frantic state of despair. He falls in love with beautiful Pauline. But every time he desires her, the skin shrinks and his life shortens. So he leaves her. When she finds him, he fears he will be unable

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to control his desire for her and the skin will shrink one last time and kill him. "Go! go! leave me," the hero says to his lover. "If you stay, I shall die. Do you want to see me die?" He shows her the skin, which begins to shrink as his desire for her grows. Suddenly she realizes what is happening, locks herself in another room, and, to save Raphael, tries to kill herself. He realizes he is dying and shouts to her: "I want to die in your arms." He breaks down the door, rushes into the room, and takes her into his arms. Unable to control his wishes or his fear of death, he dies in a state of panic.

Many literary critics speak of Raphael as another Faust. We cannot help but remember that Goethe's Faust is the work that Freud quoted more frequently than any other. What drew Freud to this particular work by Balzac as the last book he read before his death? Did Freud feel he himself made a pact with the devil when he turned his back on the worldview of his parents-embracing the scientific worldview to obtain, like the hero in the novel, fame and fortune? Freud spoke of his research into the mind as being his mistress. Did Freud fear he would die in a frantic state of fear and panic as did the hero in both the book by Berdach and the one by Balzac? Freud's physician comments that Freud used the word "shrinking" to describe his father's death many years ago: "How uncanny that he should have chosen to read this book to write 'finis' to his own story."

The day after reading The Fatal Skin, Freud took Schur's hand and reminded him of a promise made when the physician first began treating him. "You promised me then not to forsake me when my time comes. Now it's nothing but torture and makes no sense anymore." The doctor remembered. Freud thanked him and re quested that he tell his daughter Anna "about this."

After informing Anna, Dr. Schur injected Freud with two centigrams of morphine, a heavy dose that was repeated after twelve hours. At 3 A.M. on September 23, 1939, Freud died. He was cre mated on the morning of September 26, 1939, at Golders Green, a small village northwest of London.

C. S. Lewis also writes extensively about mortality. In The Problem of Pain, Lewis describes how, as an atheist, the problem of human suffering, especially "the capacity of man to foresee his own death while keenly desiring permanence," made it difficult to believe in a Creator. Before his conversion, death involved the inevitable end to a gloomy and pessimistic existence. Death equaled extinction-and though dreaded and feared, it provided a way out. When he was seventeen, Lewis wrote his friend Greeves: "My father seemed in very poor form when I got home, and fussed a lot about my cold: so everything is beastly, and I have decided-of course-to commit suicide again." Many a truth are told in jest-and we know from his autobiography that Lewis considered suicide an escape if life became unbearable.

After his conversion Lewis believed the only person to decide the time of one's death was the Person who gave one life. In The Screw tape Letters, Lewis's devil encourages murder and suicide. "If he is an emotional, gullible man," the devil advises his representative on earth to "feed him on minor poets and fifth-rate novelists of the old school until you have made him believe that 'Love' is both irresistible and somehow intrinsically meritorious. This belief is not much help, I grant you, in producing casual unchastity; but it is an incomparable recipe for prolonged, 'noble,' romantic, tragic adulteries, ending, if all goes well, in murders and suicides ... "

After his changed worldview, Lewis understood death as a result of the transgression of God's laws and not part of the original plan. Death is both the result of a Fallen Universe and the

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only hope for overcoming the Fall. "There are two attitudes towards Death which the human mind naturally adopts," Lewis explains in his classic work called Miracles. "One is the lofty view, which reached its greatest intensity among the Stoics, that Death 'doesn't matter' ... and that we ought to regard it with indifference. The other is the 'natural' point of view, implicit in nearly all private conversations on the subject, and in much modem thought about the survival of the human species, that Death is the greatest of all evils."

But neither of these two views of death reflects the view of the New Testament, which, Lewis says, is considerably more subtle. "On the one hand Death is the triumph of Satan, the punishment of the Fall, and the last enemy." But Lewis explains that death is not only an enemy that defeats every human being; it is also the means that God uses to redeem us. "On the other hand ... the death of Christ is the remedy for the Fall. Death is, in fact, what some modern people call 'ambivalent' ... It is Satan's great weapon and also God's great weapon: it is ... our supreme disgrace and our only hope; the thing Christ came to conquer and the means by which He conquered." Lewis reminds his readers that "Christ shed tears at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane ... " and "detested this penal obscenity not less than we do, but more."

Lewis asserts that the central concept of the New Testament story focuses on death. The death of Jesus of Nazareth "has some how put us right with God and given us a fresh start." This particular death "is just that point in history at which something absolutely unimaginable from outside shows through into our own world." He warns that this concept is difficult for the human mind to grasp but that is to be expected. "Indeed, if we found that we could fully understand it, that very fact would show it wasn't what it professes To be-the inconceivable, the uncreated, the thing from beyond nature, striking down into nature like lightning."

Unlike Freud, who hated growing old and who referred to the process continually in negative, pessimistic terms, Lewis appeared to enjoy the process. Writing to a friend a month before his death, he exclaims, "Yes, autumn is the best of the seasons; and I'm not sure that old age isn't the best part of life."

Before Lewis's conversion, he noticed that many of the pagan myths he had read contained a common theme. He wrote a friend: "Can one believe that there was just nothing in that persistent motif of blood, death, and resurrection, which runs like a black and scarlet cord through all the greater myths ... through Balder and Dionysus and Adonis . . . ? Surely the history of the human mind hangs together better if you suppose that all this was the first shadowy approach of something whose reality came with Christ even if we can't at present fully understand that something." The great pagan myths about a dying God that so moved Lewis as a student he now saw as signposts-all pointing to that defining moment in human history, to what he called the Grand Miracle, the Resurrection.

When Lewis fought in World War I, he was wounded and thought that he was dying. He later recalled: "Two things stand out. One is the moment, just after I had been hit, when I found (or thought I found) that I was not breathing and concluded that this was death." He found himself strangely free of fear .and any other feeling. "The proposition 'Here is a man dying' stood before my mind as dry, as factual, as unemotional as something in a textbook. It was not even interesting."

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But except for this moment, Lewis experienced all the terror that is a part of every war. When World War II began in Europe, Lewis wrote: "My memories of the last war haunted my dreams for years. Military service ... includes the threat of every temporal evil: pain and death which is what we fear from sickness: isolation from those we love which is what we fear from exile: toil under arbitrary masters, injustice and humiliation, which is what we fear from slavery: hunger, thirst, cold and exposure which is what we fear from poverty." He concludes that "death would be much better than to live through another war.”

In a lecture given at Oxford that same year titled "Learning in Wartime," Lewis makes the point that war does not "make death more frequent." He notes that "one hundred percent of us die and the percentage cannot be increased"; that war merely "puts several deaths earlier." He observes that one of the few positive aspects of war is that it makes us "aware of our mortality." "If active service does not prepare a man for death what conceivable concatenation of circumstances would?" Lewis agrees with the Psalmist that one gains wisdom from awareness of one's mortality. "Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom" (Psalm 90:12).

Lewis drives this point home in The Screwtape Letters when the devil complains that war forces people to think about and prepare for death: "How disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of death which war enforces. One of our best weapons, contented worldliness, is rendered useless. In wartime not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever." The devil considers this unfortunate. "How much better for us [devils] if all humans died in costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them, promising life to the dying . . . lest it should betray to the sick man his true condition!"

When twenty-three, Lewis wrote a letter to his father comment ing on the death of an old teacher whom they knew well: "I have seen death fairly often and never yet been able to find it anything but extraordinary and rather incredible. The real person is so very real, so obviously living and different from what is left, that one cannot believe something has turned into nothing." This observation reflects comments by some of my medical students after first observing the corpse of a patient they knew and realizing that the person was so much more than a body.

In 1929, when Lewis was thirty years old and still an atheist, his father died. Lewis's reaction reflected the intense ambivalence he felt toward his father. In a letter to a friend he describes his feelings: "I am attending at the almost painless sickbed of one for whom I have little affection and whose society has for many years given me much discomfort and no pleasure ... Nevertheless I find it almost unendurable ... there is ... though no spiritual sympathy, a deep and terrible physiological sympathy. My father and I are physical counterparts: and during these days more than ever I notice his re semblance to me." In his autobiography Lewis writes little of his father's death. "My father's death, with all the fortitude (even playfulness) which he displayed in his last illness, does not really come into the story I am telling." This is one of the few times in his autobiography that he displays little insight into himself.

In 1960, when Joy Davidman died following a long illness, Lewis wrote to a friend: "My dear Joy is dead ... Until within ten days of the end we hoped ... that she was going to hold her own, but it was not to be ... At half past one I took her into hospital in an ambulance. She was conscious for the short remainder of her life, and in very little pain thanks to drugs; and died peacefully in my company about 10.15 the same night ... You will understand that I have no heart to write more."

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Lewis's published response, A Grief Observed, makes the reader feel the anger, resentment, loneliness, fear, and restlessness of the grieving process. His anger becomes palpable when he wonders if God in the final analysis is "The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile?" He complains, "It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death,' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death and whatever it is matters ... you might as well say birth doesn't matter." He struggles to force his mind to accept the loss. "I look up at the night sky. Is there anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?" The reader can feel his pain when he writes, "Cancer, and cancer, and cancer. My mother, my father, my wife. I wonder who is next in the queue?"

Joy Davidman broke through the shell Lewis had built around himself to avoid the risk of re-experiencing the terrible loss suffered during his childhood. Now that his greatest fear had happened, he cried out: "Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back-to be sucked back into it?" But Lewis, as he worked through his grief, came to understand that "bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer.''

To understand the thoughts and feelings of Lewis once he knew he might die, we need to read his letters and consider the books he read at that time. Lewis never lost his sense of humor. In a letter to a lady who wrote about how alarmed she felt when she heard Lewis was seriously ill, he writes: "What on earth is the trouble about there being a rumour of my death? There's nothing discreditable in dying: I've known the most respectable people do it!"

In another letter a couple of years later, Lewis writes, 'What a state we have got into when we can't say 'I'll be happy when God calls me' without being afraid one will be thought 'morbid.' After all, St. Paul said just the same ... Why should we not look forward to the arrival ...?" He concludes that one can do only three things about death: "To desire it, to fear it, or to ignore it. The third alternative, which is the one the modem world calls 'healthy,' is surely the most uneasy and precarious of all.''

A few years later Lewis tried to comfort this same correspondent after she apparently received word she was seriously ill. ''What have you and I got to do but make our exit? When they told me I was in danger several months ago, I don't remember feeling distressed. I am talking, of course, about dying, not about being killed. If shells started falling about this house I should feel quite differently. An external, visible, and (still worse) audible threat at once wakes the instinct of self-preservation into fierce activity. I don't think natural death has any similar terrors."

And in another letter a few months later: "Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you: like taking off a hairshirt or getting out of a dungeon. What is there to be afraid of? ... Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret?" Lewis then tries to comfort her with words that reveal his own thoughts and feelings about his death: "There are better things ahead than any we leave behind ... Don't you think Our Lord says to you 'Peace, child, peace. Relax. Let go. Underneath are the everlasting arms ... Do you trust me so little?' Of course this may not be the end. Then make it a

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good rehearsal." Lewis signed this letter: "Yours (and like you a tired traveler, near the journey's end) Jack."

In June 1961, Lewis, who suffered an enlarged prostate, developed urinary obstruction, infection of his kidneys, and eventually toxemia with cardiac symptoms. He improved during the next few months and continued to teach, write, and visit with his friends. On July 15, 1963, Lewis had a heart attack and lapsed into a coma. He again recovered, but only briefly, living the next few months quietly and happily. Records of his last days attest to a cheerfulness, a calmness, an inner peace, and even anticipation. During this time he wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves: "Tho' I am by no means unhappy I can't help feeling it was rather a pity I did revive in July. I mean, having been glided so painlessly up to the Gate it seems hard to have it shut in one's face and know that the whole process must someday be gone through again ... Poor Lazarus!"

Though Lewis kept his sense of humor throughout his last years, he nevertheless felt keenly the separation from loved ones that death would bring. In this same letter Lewis notes that although he is "comfortable and cheerful ... the only real snag is that it looks as if you and I shall never meet again in this life. This often saddens me very much."

To another friend he writes, "I was unexpectedly revived from a long coma, and perhaps the almost continuous prayers of my friends did it-but it would have been a luxuriously easy passage, and one al most regrets having the door shut in one's face ... When you die ... look me up ... It is all rather fun-solemn fun-isn't it."

One of his biographers and a close friend notes that he spent his last days rereading his favorite books: "the Odyssey and Iliad and a little Plato in Greek; the Aeneid in Latin; Dante's Divine Comedy; Wordsworth's Prelude; and works by George Herbert, Patmore, Scott, Austen, Fielding, Dickens and Trollope."

In January of 1962, he wrote, "I knew I was in danger but was not depressed. I've read pretty well everything." About three weeks before his death, Lewis wrote to a friend that he was happy to have the leisure time to do what he enjoyed doing all of his life-read good literature. "Don't think I am not happy ... I am rereading the Iliad and enjoying it more than I have ever done."

Two weeks before his death, Lewis had lunch with a faculty col league, Richard W Ladborough. They met at Lewis's invitation to discuss a book Lewis had just read. Someone had lent him a copy of Dangerous Acquaintances (Les Liaisons Dangereuses) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. 'Wow! What a book," Lewis exclaimed. He said it was "like reading a Mozart libretto seriously: a blood curdling experience." We can understand Lewis's reading the classic works of literature that in his early years brought him great pleasure But what attracted him to this French novel, first published in 1782?

The novel, a series of letters between members of the French aristocracy, exposes the deceit, debauchery, and corruption that prevailed in high society at that time. Both the hero, Valmont, and the heroine, Merteuil, are motivated by ambition, power, and pride; they use deceit and seduction to achieve their goals. They use social privilege to prey on the weak. Critics have described the novel as "diabolical," an "indictment of . . . privileged corruption . . . and the fate of

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women in a male dominated society." One critic described the main characters as "having outgrown God, they exist in a world which has no values except those which they give it."

What motivated Lewis to read it? First, a colleague loaned Lewis the book and may have recommended it as a great novel. The novel began receiving increased attention during the 1940s and 1950s and eventually critics considered it "the greatest of eighteenth-century French novels." The author's reputation placed him alongside Alexander Dumas and Victor Hugo. So Lewis may have recognized a significant work of literature-but I think the answer lies else where. After all, Lewis authored The Screwtape Letters and other writings on the devil. He wrote often of the dangers of pride and ambition and the need of every human being for redemption. In Dangerous Acquaintances the schemers destroy all around them. Perhaps he found the "diabolical" aspects of the book and the depiction of the dark side of human nature fascinating and in agreement with his observations that he portrayed so compellingly in his popular Screwtape Letters.

During the discussion of this novel over lunch, Ladborough noted Lewis was his "usual happy and humorous self." Yet he felt Lewis was aware the end was near. "I somehow felt it was the last time we would meet and when he escorted me, with his usual courtesy, to the door, I think he felt so too. Never was a man better prepared."

How could Lewis, or anyone else, be "prepared" for death, to face this "penal obscenity" with not only cheerfulness, calmness, and inner peace, but with actual anticipation? Did his worldview provide him with the resources that made this possible? Perhaps, again, we find the answer in his own words: "If we really believe what we say we believe-if we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a 'wandering to find home,' why should we not look forward to the arrival?"

On November 22, 1963, Lewis's brother Warren brought Lewis his four o'clock tea. He noted Lewis was drowsy but calm and cheerful. In a letter, written two weeks after Lewis died, Warren writes: "Ever since the summer my brother had been steadily going down hill, though we all tried to shut our eyes to the fact. But not my brother." Warren wrote that Lewis knew he was going to die and was calm and peaceful in light of that awareness. "About a week before his death he said to me, 'I have done all that I was sent into the world to do, and I am ready to go.' I have never seen death looked in the face so tranquilly....''

Then Warren describes the last few moments of his brother's life. "On 22nd of last month I took him his tea in bed at 4 o.c., and went back to my study to do some work. At 5.30 I heard a crash in his room and ran in, to find him lying on the floor on his back, unconscious; he lived for about five minutes after that and never recovered consciousness. Would not we all wish to go the same way when our time comes?"

Epilogue

Did Freud and Lewis ever meet? The possibility is tantalizing. After Freud immigrated to England, he lived in Hampstead, in northwest London, not far from Oxford. A young Oxford professor visited Freud during this time but has not been identified. Might it have been Lewis?

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We'll never know. We do know, however, of a curious connection between the families. During World War II, to escape the bombing of London, a young woman named Jill Fluett moved from her home in London to live in the suburbs with Lewis and Mrs. Moore. Be fore meeting Lewis, she had idolized him as an author. As she came to know him, she became infatuated with the young professor. Lewis treated her kindly and kept in touch with her for many years after she left the Lewis household. Eventually, Jill married. Her lifetime love turned out to be none other than Clement Freud, the grandson of Sigmund Freud and a member of Parliament. One day Jill Freud called the Lewis home to arrange a date for her and her family to come to dinner. She was informed that Lewis had died that very afternoon.

If Freud and Lewis did meet, if Lewis was the young Oxford professor who visited Freud at his home in Hampstead, the time would have been between June 1938 and September 1939, the fifteen months that Freud lived in England before his death. Freud would have been in his eighties, Lewis less than half that age.

Would they have had anything meaningful to say to one another? Certainly when Albert Einstein visited Freud many years earlier, they shared few interests and had little to discuss. In a letter to a friend, Freud wrote of Einstein's visit: "He understands as much about psychology as I do about physics, so we had a very pleasant talk."

Lewis and Freud, by contrast, would have had a great deal to dis cuss. They shared an interest in literature as well as in psychoanalysis. Freud, already known as the father of the new literary criticism, provided critics like Lewis with new tools for interpreting human behavior.

Perhaps they would have discussed the great authors they enjoyed. Freud listed Milton's Paradise Lost as one of his two "favorite books." (Curiously, his second-favorite book, Lazarus, by the great Jewish writer Heinrich Heine, who embraced Lewis's worldview, also focused on a story in the Bible.) Lewis was already an authority on Milton, though he did not publish his famous Preface to Paradise Lost until about three years later.

Because Freud was suffering from a fatal illness, they might also have discussed the problem of pain, which both had struggled to understand. Freud may have shared with Lewis, as he had shared with a friend a decade earlier, the pessimism and hopelessness he felt when confronted with illness and the loss of a loved one: "As an unbelieving fatalist I can only let my arms sink before the terrors of death."

Lewis, out of respect for the older Freud, would probably have avoided presenting the many arguments he wrote about in The Problem of Pain. He might have simply shared with Freud how he came to a personal faith that helped him through some of his most painful experiences. Because Freud admired and often quoted St. Paul, Lewis might have acknowledged that his transition, though less dramatic and more gradual than that of Paul, was no less radical and no less transforming.

Their discussion may have roamed widely and included the topic of sex, love, death, happiness, and of course the most important one-the question of God. Whatever they discussed, it would have been an exciting experience to eavesdrop on their conversation. Hopefully, I have

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provided the reader with the next-best alternative-reviewing their thoughts on these issues in their letters and prolific publications.

What accounts for the profound impact the writings of C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud continue to have on our culture a half century after their deaths? One reason for their impact may be that, whether we realize it or not, we all embrace some form of either the materialist worldview advocated by Freud or the spiritual worldview advocated by Lewis. But there may be more subtle rea sons. Perhaps Freud and Lewis represent conflicting parts of our selves. One part raises its voice in defiance of authority, and says with Freud, "I will not surrender"; another part, like Lewis, recognizes within ourselves a deep-seated yearning for a relationship with the Creator.

Freud and Lewis agreed that the most important question concerned God's existence: Is there an Intelligence beyond the universe? Both spent a significant portion of their lives addressing this question, realizing its profound implications for understanding our identity, our purpose, and our destiny.

Yet Freud, and Lewis before his transition, also avoided con fronting the evidence. We find this easy to do. We keep ourselves distracted. We rationalize. We tell ourselves we will consider such weighty (and anxiety-provoking) subjects when we are older-when time demands will not be as great. At the moment, we have more pressing needs. As with Lewis before his transition, we really don't want to know-we nurture a "willful blindness" and a "deep-seated hatred of authority." We find repugnant the notion of "a transcendental Interferer." We feel toward our lives as both Freud and Lewis felt toward theirs: "This is my business, and mine only."

Lewis and Freud, however, also experienced deep-seated longings that haunted them persistently. Both described these feelings using the German word Sehnsucht. When sixty-six years old, Freud continued to speak of "strange, secret longings," now thinking these might be "perhaps ... for a life of quite another kind." Lewis described these experiences of longing as "the central story" of his life. After his transition, he realized they were valuable "only as a pointer to something other and outer," as "signposts" pointing to the Creator. Perhaps we all experience such longings and, like Freud, remain confused by them; or, like Lewis, recognize them as signposts. The writings of Freud and Lewis help us understand one difficulty we often have in seeing the signposts-namely, our tendency to distort our image of God. One of Freud's theories that has proved helpful clinically relates to the unconscious process of transference, the tendency to displace feelings from authority figures in our childhood onto those in the present, thus distorting and causing conflict with the present authority. If we possess a strong tendency to displace or transfer feelings from parental authority, especially the father, onto present-day authority figures, how much more might we distort our concept of an Ultimate Authority whom we cannot experience with our senses? If this holds true, we must be careful that our concept of God-whether the God we reject as unbelievers or that we worship as believers-is firmly based on the Creator revealed in history and not on our neurotic distortion of Him.

We must also be careful not to conceptualize or judge God by the faulty actions of his fallible creatures, whether those in the Bible, televangelists who go to jail, or priests who molest children. All fall short. Jesus of Nazareth was gentle and forgiving to the woman at the well who sought forgiveness, but severe with the religious leaders who failed to live what they professed.

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Our tendency to distort and create our own God, sometimes a God not of love but of hate, may explain why, over the centuries, people have committed, and continue to commit, ungodly acts - even acts of terrorism-in the name of God. This tendency to create our own God gives us insight into why the first commandment is: "You shall have no other gods before me."

Freud's and Lewis's intense negative feelings toward their fathers influenced their negative attitude toward God. Lewis, after his transition, guarded carefully against this tendency in himself. He wrote: "My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? All reality is iconoclastic."

The answer to the question of God has profound implications for our lives here on earth, both Freud and Lewis agree. So we owe it to ourselves to look at the evidence, perhaps beginning with the Old and New Testaments. Lewis also reminds us, however, that the evidence lies all around us: "We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always easy to penetrate. The real labor is to remember to attend. In fact to come awake. Still more to remain awake."

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